Mattaponi Queen: Stories [Paperback]

Belle Boggs (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 25, 2010

Winner of the 2009 Bakeless Fiction Prize, a confident debut collection about life on and around the Mattaponi Indian Reservation

Set on the Mattaponi Indian Reservation and in its surrounding counties, the stories in this linked collection detail the lives of rural men and women with stark realism and plainspoken humor. A young military couple faces a future shadowed by injury and untold secrets. A dying alcoholic attempts to reconcile with his estranged children. And an elderly woman’s nurse weathers life with her irascible charge by making payments on a decrepit houseboat—the Mattaponi Queen. The land is parceled into lots, work opportunities are few, and the remaining inhabitants must choose between desire and necessity as they navigate the murky stream of possession, love, and everything in between.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Boggs’ debut collection of interwoven stories is simultaneously sharp-edged and pastoral, downcast and humorous. Her tales are set on the Mattaponi Indian Reservation in rural downstate Virginia, an unfamiliar landscape that springs to life as each story unfolds, revealing another layer in time. A young woman, raised by her father after her mother deserted them, drops out of art school, $30,000 in debt. Now pregnant, she awaits her husband, who returns from a short stint in Iraq as an amputee. In another story, her father’s longtime friend, dying of liver disease, tries to reconnect with his kids, now living off the rez with their mom. The title story features the long-suffering nurse of a “mean and stubborn” elderly woman, gradually making payments on an old houseboat, the Mattaponi Queen. He hates to part with this wedding present he gave his second wife, who later ran off with her yoga instructor. The reader feels privy to each conversation, so pitch-perfect is Boggs’ feel for the godforsaken place her characters inhabit. --Deborah Donovan

Review

“Strongly imagined, finely controlled and well-crafted. These stories are good because they are true, true in that way that only good fiction can be.”—Percival Everett, Bakeless Fiction Judge

 

“Belle Boggs infuses these stories of sometimes hardscrabble, dreams-deferred lives with a finely crafted, absolutely confident elegance. Boggs is a writer who knows how deep and how hard we can love and live. Her characters are too real to ever forget.”—Marita Golden, author of After

 

“Belle Boggs is an immensely gifted writer, and this is a remarkable debut collection-each nuance of emotion, of insight, of dialogue and character, is pitch-perfect and surprisingly resonant.”—Mary Yukari Waters, author of The Favorites

 

“The Mattaponi River is the confluence of three rivers and is also the stunning metaphor for a place where three races have lived inextricable histories for generations. Indeed, the stories in Mattaponi Queen gather like converging waters until the narrative world is coursing and undeniable. A few lives leak away from the Mattaponi, others never leave its banks, but character and place are one in this world so unapologetically evoked by Belle Boggs' beautiful, direct prose, and tension is not so much a few events as it is a constancy that is occasionally emerged from, the water moccasin head above the
water . . . and then not . . .”—Michelle Latiolais, author of Even Now and A Proper Knowledge

 

“Mattaponi Queen was one of the best things I've read all year. I looked forward each night to a new story, and by the end, felt as if I'd been sitting in a car or on a porch with a cousin or neighbor, listening to how things went wrong, or how they could have gone right, or how they might still look up. The setting was so perfectly rendered that I saw the river, the dirt roads, the woods, and most of all, the way each character moved in that landscape. The interwoven stories remind me of Annie Proulx crossed with Ernest Gaines—the dry humor, the understatement, and the wonderful dialogue that sounds as if I'm hearing it while sitting on a folding chair in a yard.”—Susan Straight, author of A Million Nightingales

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Graywolf Press (May 25, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555975585
• ISBN-13: 978-1555975586
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #693,231 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Belle's Voice Rings True, September 16, 2010

By 

pat hoppe (WILLIAMSBURG, VA, US) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mattaponi Queen: Stories (Paperback)

The "luck" that runs like a river through MATTAPONI QUEEN by Belle Boggs is, on the surface, all hard luck, which is why some of the critics have commented that the stories are about loss. But I think that these critics do not see deeply enough;as we ride through the countryside, we may only glance at the visible corn crop or run-down house. We may need to be shown how to look more deeply at these meticulously crafted stories to see their truth and their worth, which is mighty. I think Boggs carefully plumbs the characters for what lies underneath. For instance, Skinny is not thin, but fat. And his character is not superficial, but complex and knowable. Knowing Skinny takes time; we readers do not learn about him in a flash; we get to know his children, his food, his love of his fellowmen. We find out about his marriage and its demise. We also see, in the story called "Homecoming" that Skinny befriends a high school student named Marcus who may become the school's football star with a little help. We see Skinny making Marcus's life easier with an advance on a paycheck so that Marcus can afford to buy the supplements he needs at the health food store. This is just one example of Boggs' skill of "layering" trait upon trait so that we become knowledgeable about the characters slowly, over time, in several places in more than one of her stories. She has the insight and the depth of perception to cause us, her readers, to come to some epiphanies about "real" life. So her stories could be described as neo-realism. Combined, they sketch an area of America off the beaten path as they sketch people we may not have met. But these folks are memorable because of their complexities, their foibles, their obstacles, their genuine and sometimes touching naivete. Boggs's stories are a delight. She is an amazing young woman with tremendous talent. She delights us now just as she will continue to delight in the future.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful Collection of Interlocking Stories -- A Writer to Watch, August 22, 2010

By 

K (Philadelphia, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mattaponi Queen: Stories (Paperback)

Thank god Belle Boggs's husband, Richard Allen, submitted her manuscript to Bread Loaf's Bakeless Prize competition. If not for him, who knows how long we would've had to wait for this masterful story collection about the people who live along the Mattaponi River in the small towns of eastern Virginia. Boggs is as fluid with dialogue and detail as she is with the inner lives of a wide range of country characters, including a proud but lovelorn elementary school principal, an ailing Mattaponi tribesman with a history of substance abuse, a cheerleading coach whose husband undergoes a sex change, and a Brooklyn high school sprinter who comes to live with his grandmother when his drug-dealing mother lands in jail. Even as Boggs, who grew up in King William County, maps her entire community, the world along the Mattaponi River only seems to expand the further the collection unfolds. Major characters in early stories return as peripheral figures later on, and Boggs's elegant open endings create the sense that we have only just scratched the surface of these people's yearning, if often ordinary lives.

As a lover of interconnected stories, I'm grateful to have picked up this book -- and very much looking forward to whatever Boggs writes next.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For the disquiet of relationships and the quiet power of life read Mattaponi Queen, July 29, 2010

By 

Shann Ray "fan of great lit" (Spokane, WA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mattaponi Queen: Stories (Paperback)

As you enter the world created by Belle Boggs, be ready to be submerged into a sense of seeing the unseen. Her work is an elegant interplay between the artistic nature of the heart of people and the subtle profound dance created by prose that gives life even as it awakens old tragedy. Boggs opens us to characters, female and male, who sometimes transcend their own frailties, and always provide a uniquely grounded view of the human condition. Because of this refreshing sense of the complexities of human nature alongside the quiet strength of what is right in the world, we come away from Mattaponi Queen a little better, a little more absorbed by the intricate nature of the world, and at last more graceful with ourselves and those around us.

An excellent and enduring collection of stories, Mattaponi Queen won the prestigious Bakeless Prize and was recently short-listed for the Frank O'Connor prize, one of the world's most recognized honors celebrating the short story.

Pick up Mattaponi Queen and encounter an author whose touch with the world is deft and delicate, quietly powerful, and capable of providing the kind of honesty and transport that make us grateful for how art can mysteriously transform life.